I looked at the time. My usual train home left about an hour ago, and I had another half hour until the next one. I worked on putting the final touches on a big project for work; we were supposed to be rolling out a major website redesign, and it would be going to production Monday morning. I poked my head up from my cube and looked around; no one else on my team was there. Typical. I remembered seeing an email that said something about a bar meetup to welcome some new person that got hired in another department. I sat back down and continued testing my code changes. Everything was mostly finished, but I needed to double check everything on the staging environment before it went live. I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard a soft “excuse me.” Weird, pretty sure I was the last one left. I took off my headphones and turned around. Ah, it was the cleaning staff, and they wanted me to move so they could vacuum. Sure. Well, I was nearly done anyway. Control, Command, and Q; the M

I walked with Shea to the Fiefdom of Urd, the nearby city responsible for spring-boarding Adventurers and hero wannabes into the forest in return for money and rank. It wasn’t quite “Dungeon Diving,” but it had all the hallmarks of a Player’s “first town.” The local feudal lord was a vassal of the King, but “everyone” said that he bought the position. No one really knew how, though, and he was never seen in town. The primary industry for the town was the Adventurer’s Guild, which handled most of the labor needs for the region, and the rest of the town supported the Adventurers. People from all over came to Urd to either try their luck at being an Adventurer in hopes of a quick path to success and riches, or to sell things to people in hopes of a quick path to success and riches. The forest I had woken up in was called the Fangwell Forest, and it covered the majority of the valley we were in with little pockets of town sprinkled through. From the Thundermond mountains in the nort

Ravage looked up at me and took a step back from Jada. Her head dropped down and her whole body started folding in on itself as cat limbs disappeared and small human-shaped limbs emerged. The cat’s body unfolded and folded again like origami. It seemed to be going slowly and deliberately, which made me think of nearly every robot show I’d ever seen that gave you in-depth transformation scenes at first then later skipped over them. Now I was wondering if they went slow at first to test things out, or if it was a skill thing where you got faster as you gained experience. Ravage the cat was gone and in her place stood a small, humanoid Automata no more than a foot and a half tall. Her face was featureless and white like Elita’s, but she had long fibrous black hair that flowed down her back and little kitty ears on top of her head. The cat tail was still present and flicked from side to side. If you knew to look for it you could see the shape of the cat head in her chest and the cat e

After Shea finished her breakfast, the girls headed out again. This time they would go to the Guildhall and try to get Elita registered as an Adventurer and then register their own party. I wished them luck as they set out. Again I’d be left to my own devices, so I worked on getting the shop cleaned up. This was going to take a lot of work—the shop hadn’t been touched in ages—but then I remembered that I had those three dead Automata in my [Inventory]. Time to try a new idea. I didn’t have any nearby souls to connect to according to my [developer] installation tools, so I couldn’t go that route, but I wanted something simpler anyway. I got the bodies repaired and lined up against the workbench. All of them were taller than me but more human-sized. I guessed these were intended to be servants and would have to fit in with human staff as well as wear human-sized clothes. I completely replaced the firmware that was installed with new firmware. These bodies would simply be proxy

I rushed back to the workshop; my Pretender shell was nearly finished and this wolf pelt and the shadow crystals were the last things I needed. I was glad that I was able to get out of the Guildhall without too many problems. Trying to get back to the shop, I was stopped behind a crowd; it seemed some important person was coming through and was making a big deal of it. I pushed my way through the crowd in time to see a handsome, princely looking person walking while smiling at the crowds of people. Behind him was an Automata dressed like a footman and loaded with bags and boxes; it was clearly struggling to hold them all. One of the boxes slipped from its grip and landed on the ground. The Princely person stopped and turned to look at the box, his smile turning to an angry sneer. As the Automata struggled to try and pick the box back up, Princely kicked the Automata, knocking it over and spilling all the boxes and bags everywhere. Each time the Automata went to pick up another p